"Both Scott McGregor and David Bienvenu have posted that they are leaving Mozilla Corp. My understanding from chats with them weeks ago...is that they have decided to start a new venture," Ascher said. "They've worked on Thunderbird and its predecessors within Mozilla and Netscape for a long time, and I can certainly understand their desire to do something different."

McGregor and Bienvenu both said they were leaving Mozilla on October 12, but added that they planned to continue work on Thunderbird, an open-source program for checking, writing and storing e-mail.

Ascher added that the Thunderbird company, called MailCo for the time being, is trying to hire new staff and that all Mozilla programmers already involved full time were offered positions.